A number of participants are viewing the sessions at partner sites throughout the United States and Canada, Nigeria, Panama, Sudan and South Africa. Others are attending via live webcast. During a panel discussion after Brueggemann’s presentation, questions came in via video conferencing from South Africa, Missouri, Connecticut and Toronto, in addition to those asked by New York participants.<\/p>\n
Church Divinity School of the Pacific Dean and President Mark Richardson said in introducing Brueggemann that modern-day skeptics look for an “unfeeling God of the scripture that they find by treating the material of the Bible as if it can be flattened out into facts much as scientific inquiry is about discreet, quantifiable things and processes, and then they attack the God they think they have discovered in scriptures.”<\/p>\n
Thus, he said, the Bible becomes “a symbol of what is past and what must make for a new spirituality.”<\/p>\n